​2017 Tour de France: Stage 7 Daily Dish

Quick-Step sprinter Marcel Kittel’s Stage 7 victory over Dimension Data’s Edvald Boassen Hagen was by the narrowest of possible margins. Kittel’s closing speed and bike throw were enough to give him his third stage win of the 2017 Tour de France by a gap that was only visible via the slit camera that ASO uses to film finish lines. (Come out on top in your next photo finish with Maximum Overload for Cyclists!)

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With a slit camera, the lens is shaped as a line, not a sphere, and records images continuously when turned on (although these cameras are digital now, perhaps the easiest way to think of it is like a film camera, where film is slid past the slit and exposed continuously). In a film finish line camera there are no frames; in a digital finish camera there are, but the frame rate—up to 10,000 images a second—makes it functionally identical. Where a conventional camera captures a fixed moment in time; a finish line camera captures a variety of times (ie. rider’s speeds and locations) at a fixed point: the finish line. That’s how judges are able to see a winning margin of less than a centimeter at speeds of more than 70 kilometers an hour.

A photo from a more definitive finish

Tim de Waele/ GETTY

New finish time rules mean safer sprints for everyone

The past two stages, overall leader Chris Froome has finished 56th and 48th, respectively. That’s markedly lower than his typical finish on sprint stages in past Tours. In Thursday’s Stage 6, Froome’s Sky team kept him up front and out of trouble until inside 3km to go, whereupon they switched off the gas a bit and drifted back to let the sprinters do their thing.

Froome’s not getting soft. He’s just taking advantage of a new UCI rule meant to make sprint finishes safer. There’s already a rule that if a rider crashes with less than 3km to go he gets the same time as the group he was in. But what about when there aren’t crashes?

Finish times are taken for bunches of riders. If there’s a single pack, then all riders in the pack get the same time as the first rider to cross the line, even if five, 10 or 20 seconds pass between rider 1 and rider 190 actually crossing the line. But in past years, if there was a split of at least one second in that group, the officials would place all riders in the next group based on their real elapsed time from the winner. That always led to some frenetic riding by GC contenders, who would try to stay very close up front to avoid being caught in a second group if, say, a sprinter’s leadout man eased off the gas and let a gap open up in the final meters. That was problematic because, well, climbers aren’t sprinters, and having so many riders trying to stay up front made for dangerous crashes.

At this year’s Tour, the time gaps still exist, but the rule is now three seconds rather than one. That is – three seconds from the last rider in a group to pass until the first rider in the next. At sprint speeds of 70kph, that’s more than 50 meters. What that means functionally is that GC contenders can go ahead and sit up the final few hundred meters and not worry about losing time to a rival who managed to sneak into the front group.

Timing the catch to the break just got easier... if you like math

The old rule in cycling is that a chasing pack can take a minute out of a breakaway over 10 kilometers of flat to rolling road. In reality, it’s a lot more complicated. How many riders are in the break? Are they strong and working well together, or tired and fractious? What about the wind speed and direction?

A pack can make up 30 seconds in a couple of kilometers, as they did on Stage 7 when former World Champion Philippe Gilbert took a late pull that dropped the break’s lead from 40 seconds to less than 10. Or with a tailwind, the pack can fight to claw back just two seconds.

Fortunately, there’s help. Hendrik Van Maldeghem, a mathematics professor at Ghent University, created a formula last year that takes more of those variables into account. For example: when a break is bigger than nine riders, rider fatigue decreases dramatically because there are more riders to share the workload. Here’s the formula:

c=a constant of 10 minus a, where a is the number of riders in the break if it's less than 10

X=distance at which the pack should start to chase

It’s basic algebra, but if you’d rather not worry about it, just hop on over to their handy web calculator, enter a few fields and then impress your friends on social with your sure-fire prediction of whether the break gets caught or stays away.

A warm welcome to Phillipa York

Longtime cycling fans will remember Robert Millar, a fantastically talented Scottish rider who won the KoM jerseys at both the Tour and the Giro d’Italia and nearly won the Giro and Tour of Spain outright. Millar (no relation to ex-pro David Millar) was also a teammate of Greg LeMond’s on the 1990 Z-Peugeot team that propelled LeMond to his third Tour win. Robert Millar lives only in our memory now, but that’s not a tragedy. Here’s why:

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In a post on CyclingNews, Robert Millar revealed that he is transgender and is now, publicly, Philippa York. York began transitioning years ago but kept her journey largely private. But her work for CyclingNews and, in particular, British broadcaster ITV, where she is on the Tour commentary team, as well as growing public acceptance of transgender people, led her to step forward publicly. Bicycling would like to extend a warm welcome to Philippa and express our support, and we look forward to her coverage of pro cycling for years to come.

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